Is Open-Source Really That Important Nowadays?
It is undeniable that much of the technologic evolution that are part of our lives nowadays has its origin on competition. When a market sector gets dominated by different giants, a capitalism miracle is going to happen: these companies will dispute among themselves which one can develop the best product for the final consumer, at the best cost/benefit relation.
During these situations, the entire world has developed. This is exactly how we today can enjoy having access to this world's library named World Wide Web, containing the entire human being's knowledge, from a device that fits our hands and works wirelessly that we use to call "phone".
We must also thank this for knowing computers as we know nowadays. Depending on your age and familiarity with these machines, perhaps you can't figure out how people could use computers everyday at their offices while the graphical user interface did not exist yet. Yeah, some time ago, black screens with white or green texts weren't something meant only for programmers or hackers to use.
Graphical user interfaces as we know, with a mouse as interface, started existing back in 1975, with Xerox, and became popular with Apple and Microsoft operating systems.
The same thing seems to have happened on the smartphones sector. Although smartphones already existed in the 90’s, they were focused on the executive market. The initial focus has been given after a marketing campaign by a Canada-based company named Research in Motion, during an event that met several executives and businessmen. The action was pretty simple: every visitor, at the event beginning, received a hand-held device and it was said that they could use the device as they want during the event. When the event was ending, many of the visitors were amazed with the device, for being able to check their emails and browse using WAP straight from their hands. So was born Blackberry.
Nowadays we've got used to the devices we have access to. Probably this morning, after waking up, the first thing you have done is checking your notifications. Or perhaps your favorite messaging app? Or a news portal app? It's somehow hard to reimagine our daily routine without these devices.
We saw that for much of the technological evolution credits are given to the competition. From this point, it's hard to imagine that several developers, mostly geographically separated, are working hard to push evolution towards, and consciously not getting paid. Therefore, we ask ourselves: is the Open-Source evolution relevant? Can we feel it present on our daily routines?
Yes, we can. Not all open-source licenses require credits. Even so, when they require credits, it's basically a long juridical text among other juridical texts somewhere in the settings of your phone that you probably will not read.
Programmers hardly write every single part of a software. Although they know how to do it, it would not productive. Why to write code that opens up a webserver if it already exists as open-source and is available for download and usage on the internet?
For this reason, most of the softwares that we use on our computers and even websites that we access on our browsers are made up by a bunch of third-parties' codes — from small snippets to large codebases. Depending on the language, it can be called "library", "package", "modules", "dependency" etc. Different names for the same thing: highly used codebases responsible for a specified action.
There are paid libraries for several tasks, of course, but open-source libraries got more popular in programming forums. And it's more advantageous to use open-source libraries, since if you find a bug on it, you can contribute and report or even fix it yourself. This is not the case with paid libraries, since you have to wait for a fix from the producer company.
And these libraries are present everywhere, not only on your computer: if you are an iPhone user, its kernel (this is the 'core' of the operating system) is named Darwin. It is the same kernel that powers macOS. Although it is open-source, it was also based on another open-source operating system named Unix. To name another open-source operating systems that are also based on Unix, we could mention Linux and its distributions that you probably already have heard about: Ubuntu, CentOS and even Kali, the operating system used by hackers and security analysts showed on Mr. Robot series. It's all open-source.
Open-source is not made up only by libraries and codes that you can't see. In many times, open-source is palpable. Are you an Android user? Android is open-source as well!
On web environment, it's easy to see how Open-Source is present: 68% of the webservers use Linux as operating system [1]. Even Microsoft does [2]. 85% of the websites run on two open-source webserver softwares, Apache and nginx [3]. 80% of the websites are developed using PHP, an open-source programming language [4]. 9 out of 10 top websites and services like Google, Facebook, Tumblr, PayPal, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube use MySQL, an open-source database engine [5, 6]. And 30% of the websites use WordPress, an open-source blogging tool developed using PHP and MySQL [7]. You probably made use of hundreds of open-source projects since you woke up and did not know about it.
Developers contribute with open-source for several reasons, from getting experience to getting a job. Yeah, because open-source developers are used to develop with large distributed teams and following standards on huge projects, and these are characteristics that entrepreneurs seek to build their teams. This is why in some companies, it's usual to ask for the GitHub profile during the HR interview.
Leading companies find it interesting to invest heavily in open-source. Not by altruism, but for business. The 'catch' is that by giving developers a piece of technology that they will make hard use of, and send contributions, they will get benefited with it directly (by also being able to use the piece on their project) or indirectly.
An example of indirect benefit can be viewed with WebKit. WebKit is the webpages render that works on Safari browser, for macOS and iOS. And it is open-source. For many years, it has been adopted by Google Chrome as well. The browser got popular and won the market, which was dominated by Mozilla Firefox, which is also open-source. Chrome is not open-source, but is based on an open-source project named Chromium. Nowadays, Chrome uses a rendering engine named Blink, which is a WebKit fork. A fork happens when a project starts from the full copy of an origin project and gets modifications from the original product. Yeah, open-source things.
However, open-sourcing WebKit and mainly the fact that it had been adopted by Google also on their also open-source mobile operating system Android, has given WebKit an unexpected relevance. It made possible open-source projects like PhoneGap/Cordova, which allowed developers to create cross-platform mobile apps using web technologies, and Electron (formely Atom Shell), which allowed creating cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies as well. These projects made possible the creation of several mobile and desktop applications, that also helped growing the iOS and macOS environments. It also helped growing Android environment, benefiting Google, who also invested a lot on WebKit.
With all the party around web technologies, the world saw that with web development they could develop for nearly anything. It strengthened languages used in web development, and we started hearing about HTML5 and CSS3, killing proprietary technologies like Flash and using Javascript for everything.
The Blockchain era that started in 2009 initiated with a well known open-source project named Bitcoin. Since then, several projects appeared with improvements. Some of these projects appeared as forks, while others were written from scratch. Most of them remained open-source.
At Capitual, we work with open-source projects on a daily basis. We have open-sourced some of the tools we use internally, contributed on projects that we regularly use and built a special page where you can see some of the open-source projects that makes Capitual possible. You can access it on: opensource.capitual.com.
Although it is not so easy to imagine a strong open-source community on the pre-WWW era, nowadays it's clear that open-source is everywhere, and for much of what we have today, credits are given to the open-source community.
